Home » » Recovering items deleted from Public Folders in Exchange 2013

Public folders are the feature of
Exchange server which is used to share mailbox and related folders with others Exchange
server users within the organization. The key purpose of the public folder to take
advantage of high availability of data, so that a user or selected users in a
group can access the folder on the same network who are using the same email
client.

While working and accessing the
same folder, I’ve seen lot of scenarios when user deletes important data and
forget to recover it. So in the article I am sharing multiple ways to recover
the items which is accidently deleted from public folders in Exchange server
2013. Let’s check it-

Solution 1:

The simplest way to recover the
deleted items from public folder is already inbuilt in MS Outlook. Open your
Outlook email client and look for the
'Recover Deleted Items' in Folder menu. Just click this option and all
recently deleted public folder items will be shown in a new window. You can
select the items/folder and restore it again. That’s it!

But what if retention period has
been expired and still you have to restore these items. In such cases check the
second solution-

Solution 2:(Recover items if retention period is over)

Once deleted items pass the
default/configured retention period, it can’t be recovered. However, if you
have a recent backup then you can restore the last backup which stored the
related public folder mailbox. This is the only option if you stuck in this
scenario. To do this, firstly you need to restore the backup database to a
Recovery Database. Once restore process is done, run the below command-

By executing the command, the
disappeared/deleted items from the related public folder will be recovered to
the same public folder. But make sure your MS Exchange Server 2013 is updated
with Cumulative Update
2.

Additionally, there is another
solution as well if you’re good at PowerShell. Try the below solution-

Solution 3: (Recovery using Exchange Management Shell)

EMS is quick solution to recover
deleted public folders and public folder contents, but before restoring the
public folder it is required to find the root path of affected folder; whether
you’re the owner of the public folder or not.

The command will save a text file
(For e.g. publicfolderfile.txt) at your desired location which contains the
information of affected public folder.

Suppose you had a pubic folder
named 'PB1' which is accidently deleted and now you need to recover this
folder. Open the saved .txt file and search the folder path in this file. Once
you find the folder name in the file, run the command-

Now open the Outlook and check
again, the public folder has been recovered with all the permissions and you
can access all the data and save it. The same process is also applicable to
restore the deleted child public folders.

So these are the manual solutions
to recover the deleted contents from public folder. In case first solution
didn’t help and you’re not familiar with Exchange shell commands, I can also suggest
you try an automated way to recover the deleted item from public folder.

Give Exchange
EDB to PST Converter tool by Stellar a try, and recover all the deleted
items from public folder and user’s mailboxes. The software will scan your
online as well offline database and show you all the contents even it is
deleted from mailbox or public folder. Further, you can save the deleted items
in multiple saving file formats including PST as it is easier to import into
Outlook. But make sure the mailbox retention
policy is not expired for the corresponding Exchange server.